So far from the preservation of liberty and property and the securing of equal rights being the chief and most conspicuous object aimed at by the archaic politics of which we know anything, it would be a good deal nearer the truth to say that they were federated absolute monarchies, the chief purpose of which was the maintenance of an established church for the worship of the family ancestors.

[These articles stirred up critics of every sort and kind; socialists who denounced him as an individualist, land nationalisers who had not realised the difference between communal and national ownership, or men who denounced him as an arm-chair cynic, careless of the poor and ignorant of the meaning of labour.  Mr. Spencer considered the chief attack to be directed against his position; the regimental socialists as against theirs, and:—­]

as an attempt to justify those who, content with the present, are opposed to all endeavours to bring about any fundamental change in our social arrangements (ib. page 423).

So far from this, he continues:—­]

Those who have had the patience to follow me to the end will, I trust, have become aware that my aim has been altogether different.  Even the best of modern civilisations appears to me to exhibit a condition of mankind which neither embodies any worthy ideal nor even possesses the merit of stability.  I do not hesitate to express my opinion that, if there is no hope of a large improvement of the condition of the greater part of the human family; if it is true that the increase of knowledge, the winning of a greater dominion over Nature which is its consequence, and the wealth which follows upon that dominion, are to make no difference in the extent and the intensity of Want, with its concomitant physical and moral degradation, among the masses of the people, I should hail the advent of some kindly comet, which would sweep the whole affair away, as a desirable consummation.  What profits it to the human Prometheus that he has stolen the fire of heaven to be his servant, and that the spirits of the earth and of the air obey him, if the vulture of pauperism is eternally to tear his very vitals and keep him on the brink of destruction?

Assuredly, if I believed that any of the schemes hitherto proposed for bringing about social amelioration were likely to attain their end, I should think what remains to me of life well spent in furthering it.  But my interest in these questions did not begin the day before yesterday; and, whether right or wrong, it is no hasty conclusion of mine that we have small chance of doing rightly in this matter (or indeed in any other) unless we think rightly.  Further, that we shall never think rightly in politics until we have cleared our minds of delusions, and more especially of the philosophical delusions which, as I have endeavoured to show, have infested political thought for centuries.  My main purpose has been to contribute my mite towards this essential preliminary operation.  Ground must be cleared and levelled before a building can be properly commenced; the labour of the navvy is as necessary as that of the architect, however much less honoured; and it has been my humble endeavour to grub up those old stumps of the a priori which stand in the way of the very foundations of a sane political philosophy.